Category Archives: capitalism

Parental (and paternity) leave is a feminist issue

Posted on December 20, 2014 by Sinéad Redmond

The Irish Times this week, followed en masse by other papers and mainstream media outlets, breathlessly rushed to report that 2 Irish MEPs were the MEPs with the worst record of attendance at voting sessions of the European Parliament in Strasbourg. What they didn’t manage to initially include in the story, and which transpired over the course of the day that the story broke, was that one of the MEPs (Brian Crowley) has been unable to attend at all as he’s ill, and that the other, Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan, has needed to be at home with his wife, newborn baby, and other children. His wife has also been ill, in addition to having all the intensive, non-stop demands of a newborn to contend with. As at the time of writing, the Irish Times has run four separate follow-up pieces by Suzanne Lynch, all focusing on Ming’s ‘dismal voting record’, how he should suffer financially for it, and should Irish MEPs (and by obvious inference Ming) have even bothered to run at all if they were going to let down the electorate like that by non-attendance through having the nerve to have babies and families that need caring for? In one piece, Lynch attempted a mealy-mouthed pretence at recognising the fact that Ming was at home, caring for his unwell wife and their newborn baby as well as their other children, calling this ‘mitigating circumstances’, claiming that “[n]o one is suggesting [his need to take paternity leave] should elicit anything less than complete empathy” while immediately following this up by suggesting that his low attendance “while drawing full salaries raises the question as to whether Ireland’s MEP system is fit for purpose.”

No, actually, that’s exactly how parental and paternity leave systems SHOULD work. Nobody should be financially penalised for having a baby. (This is not a conversation about whether people who are supposed to be representing the public should be paid as much more than the majority of that public than they are, though that’s a conversation worth having too.) Nobody should be forced to attend their workplace immediately after the birth of a child for fear of losing their job – or indeed, as in the Irish system and in this instance, depending on the time of the birth, DURING the birth of a child. (In Ireland, because there is no entitlement whatsoever to paternal leave, new fathers are reliant on their holiday leave and employer’s vagaries to be able to be present at the birth of their children should that birth be during working hours, as well as to be home with their partner and newborn in the time after the birth.) Nobody should have their absence from their job as the result of the birth of a child and needing to be at home to care for that child, their unwell partner, and their other children reported in the national media and the subject of this kind of intense and judgemental scrutiny. No man should be expected to abandon his sick partner for her to provide alone the kind of intensively demanding all-around-the-clock care that a newborn provides, in order to show up at a place of work. And certainly no sick woman should be left alone to care for a newborn without the support she has a right to expect from her partner in creating that newborn, as well as support in caring for herself and her other children. What kind of barbaric social system would demand that?

Only, of course, the one we live under; a horrible combination of capitalism and patriarchy, which holds ‘work’ (meaning, of course, paid work, done outside the home, not something as petty and gendered as simply bringing a child into the world, caring for its every need, raising it as a moral being and seeing to its needs around the clock) as supreme; as an unquestionable overlord to be served without regard to personal needs and circumstances. “Doing your job”, in this paradigm, is paramount, and excuses everything from the actual killing of another human being to being expected to abandon one’s partner, the person one is assumed to love and honour above all others, to the 24/7 backbreaking work of caring for a house full of children (one a newborn) alone. And sure if you’re paid enough can you not just pay someone else to do that caring nonsense for you?

At no point in any of this coverage has the fact been mentioned that no Irish political representative – whether at local government level, at national level, or European level – has ANY right to any parental leave, whether that be paternity or maternity leave. It took Nessa Childers on Twitter to do that first. Nor did any of the coverage point out that while it’s “only one session a month” (as many on Twitter appeared to enjoy very much repeating), that “one session a month” extends to four consecutive days, and there are no direct flights between Dublin and Strasbourg, meaning this “one session” could very well in fact have demanded a full week every month away from Ming’s wife, newborn baby and other children. Even if his wife weren’t unwell, this would be an utterly unreasonable burden of care to lay on a woman who has just become a mother all over again. The blanket and unquestioning expectation apparent in not only the mainstream media coverage, but also the majority of the Twitter commentary on this, that if she weren’t sick (and in some cases that even though she is; and in yet some more, even more deplorable ones, that somehow they have the right to know HOW sick she is, and why, and since when, and why didn’t they know earlier), that he should have abandoned her, their newborn, and their other children, to the almighty power that is Work, is frankly sickening. A father should have the right to be with his newborn, just as a mother should have the right to not be the enforced sole, isolated carer of her newborn simply because its father needs to worship at the altar of Work. One of the most telling things of the coverage of this whole (non) issue is that there hasn’t been a single piece which can point to any of the votes he missed and name it as a topical one, as one that’s relevant to Ireland’s interests, or indeed one of those missed votes of his as having had any possible impact on the outcome if he had attended. Why isn’t that what’s being questioned as being a broken political representation system, rather than his having needed to take time to be with his family?

It is not possible to expect to see, and argue for, women’s participation in politics and public life rising from its current dismally low level, while also creating a society which excoriates men for taking up their part of the caring responsibilities that having a family entails. Perpetuating the idea and the necessity that only women can have space to do that not only condemns women to unpaid work in the home but also does not allow for space to honour that work; which has the potential to be beautiful, rewarding, and thoroughly worth doing. The work of caring for and raising a child is every bit as important to society, if not more so, than paid attendance at a workplace.

Sometimes people with babies need to be with those babies. Sometimes people with sick partners need to be with those sick partners because that’s what a partnership looks like. (It’s definitely what my partnership with my husband looked like when I was having an absolutely hideous time after our daughter was born, suffering from intense and unexpected postnatal depression, and would absolutely fall apart when he needed to be out of the house for even an hour, let alone travelling to another country for a full week.) No society that is worth living in should seek to punish or castigate its members for so doing.

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Posted in capitalism, Equality, feminism, Politics, The family. Bookmark the permalink.

Those who can, teach. Those who can’t, complain about teachers.

Posted on December 2, 2014 by Stephanie Lord

The Irish media has been clamouring to give voice to beleaguered parents and concerned citizens condemning today’s teachers’ strike. Some of those commenting on the ASTI and TUI decision to picket seem to be under the impression that teachers are just obstreperous babysitters who live a cosseted existence, overpaid and underworked, doing an easy job that a monkey could do in their sleep – except these monkeys are particularly greedy. The reality of this couldn’t be further from the truth and there is far more to teaching than standing in front of a classroom from one end of the day to the next.

Teaching is a profession that’s viewed with an almost unique level of disdain in some quarters. The phrase “those who can’t do, teach” might be used in a self-deprecating manner by some teachers but it’s something that genuinely appears be the core mind-set underpinning the criticisms of the strike. Texts are being read out on Newstalk from critics saying “these teachers are only afraid of doing more work with no extra pay,” as if teachers should be martyring themselves and teaching for free, for the pure love of imparting their knowledge to students, as if instilling a love of learning in pupils should be reward enough in itself. It’s probably only teachers and nurses that are consistently faced with the attitude that serving others should be compensation enough and it’s no coincidence that it’s a female-dominated professions that bring out comments such as that. The Minister herself isn’t immune from subtly making that same criticism, even though the strike isn’t actually about the rate of teachers pay. But even if it was, who could blame them? Why should teachers do more work for no extra pay?

Reform of the Junior Cert is badly needed. Students who are 15 years old shouldn’t be faced with exams of that intensity. The only thing I even remember about my own Junior Cert is that I bluffed my way through the English Paper 1 and wrote an essay that had something to do with Paul Weller and me on bikes in Drogheda, that a bottle of Sunny Delight leaked in my bag during the history exam, and that the horror of the whole exam experience provoked an episode of insomnia and sleeping difficulties that I’ve never fully shaken off.

Everyone agrees that the JC needs radical changes, and the elements of project work and continual assessment that are being incorporated should be welcomed. But when the people who are being expected to implement these reforms object on the basis that there is no best practice or evidence to support the claims being made by the Minister for Education Jan O’Sullivan, and further that there are issues around the resources being given to support them to implement the reforms, then they should be listened to. No matter how much a media and public given to teacher bashing would like to paint this as ultimately being a pay dispute, the crux of the strike is about who actually marks the Junior Cert papers. The Minister for Education allegedly believes teachers marking their own pupils is, educationally speaking, best practice for students. The Minister has moved from saying that internal marking 100% of the time is best, to saying that 40% internal marking will do, for the purposes of getting the reforms through. It’s unclear how much money will be saved in not paying other teachers to mark the junior cert papers but it’s a substantial amount given the sheer number of students involved, and the research or evidence that the Minister is basing her claims on hasn’t appeared thus far.

There are clearly difficulties in Ireland in making teachers mark the papers of their own pupils in a high stakes exam. That’s not to say that teachers are unable to mark the papers in the same way they would with other exams and tests they set for their classes, but to point out the difficulties that present in a state where schools are controlled by completely unaccountable boards of management and very often securing employment is based on who you know. There are teachers in Ireland who are as precariously employed as a person working in McDonalds on a temporary contract because they can’t get anything other than covering someone else’s maternity leave, and then four hours a week subbing when that teacher returns to their permanent post. Teachers may not cave to pressure in exam marking, but they will certainly come under it. In many cases, the students’ marks will be as high stakes for the teachers as the students themselves.

Teachers might not actively attempt to mark students unfairly (although I wouldn’t afford the benefit of that particular doubt to the teacher I had for Junior Cert geography) but there is evidence to suggest that teachers can be influenced by irrelevant factors in marking such as gender, socio-economic background, effort and behaviour of pupils. They are only human. Many teachers are now engaging in what could more accurately described as crowd control rather than education as a result of consistent severe cutbacks to school budgets and resources by this government. It is completely unreasonable to expect them to teach their class and mark their own students’ exams in an unbiased manner while not being offered adequate training to carry out what is envisaged in the marking scheme, or even enough training to actually deliver reforms to the curricula that they actually agree with; Not to mention that teachers will be expected to continue doing all of the extra-curricular work they do for free, like teaching the choir, or coaching the camogie team, or giving extra-lessons to struggling students in their own time while being continually demoralised by a government that doesn’t value what they do.

The Minister is quick to point out how other states assess students at that level fully through internally marked exams, but they are different school systems. The 26 Counties has one of the highest pupil-teacher ratios in the EU. Thousands of students spend the duration of their school life in cold, damp, mouldy prefab buildings. There are teachers who have never taught in anything else. Schools have had 1% cuts to capitation grants every year for the past three years while pupil numbers have increased. More students with special needs assistants are attending mainstream schools than ever before, so the Department of Education changed the rules to make it harder for them to get special needs assistants to support them in the classroom. Qualified special needs assistants were let go and some replaced with Jobbridge interns. The Department recognised that there are high levels of mental health issues among students in schools and introduced suicide prevention guidelines. However they took away guidance counsellors in schools with under 500 pupils who have ordinarily supported students with anxiety and mental health difficulties, leaving teachers to fill this role. Teachers who can’t secure permanent positions are told to apply for Jobbridge internships and do the same job as their peers for their unemployment benefit plus €50 extra a week. Schools make up the funding shortfall by increasing the so-called “voluntary” contribution that parents must pay. Teachers then have to deal with stressed parents who cannot afford to pay this because the Credit Union won’t lend them anymore money or because St. Vincent de Paul have already paid their electricity bill for them this month and they can’t ask for more.

This is what our teachers deal with on top of teaching. It would benefit us all to recognise the importance of their work and the pressure that they are under right now, and for the government to address the decimation they’ve inflicted on the education system before they go introducing a new system based on research that may or may not exist, that they in no way have the capacity to deliver. This is why we should support the teachers’ strike – despite the media driven hysteria.

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Posted in capitalism, Education, Equality, feminism, Politics and tagged education, exams, Ireland, jobbridge, politics, poverty, precarious employment, school, teacher's strike, teaching, trade unions. Bookmark the permalink.

Tesco and the myth of corporate social responsibility

Posted on July 30, 2014 by Stephanie Lord

Tesco’s latest charity drive aroused controversy on social media this week after giving customers small blue tokens for each purchase that they could then place in one of three clear boxes for a charity . Every six weeks the Tesco branch will divide €1,000 between the three charities according to how many blue tokens they have in their pot. The idea is nice; you can buy over-packaged food and some local group will benefit from your hardening arteries. Each branch of Tesco was allowed to pick the charities, and that women’s refuges received less money than animal sanctuaries as a result of consumer’s choices caused a bit of a stir.

It won’t come as a shock to anyone who has had even the slightest interaction with liberal types, that it’s fairly common that people give charitable donations to animals before people in need. It’s also fairly common for people to look at this type of scenario and say “Well at least there was a women’s refuge you could donate to” in the range of the deserving poor according to Tesco – and this post does not aim to condemn the people who hold that view. In a climate where the state is engaged in a mission to complete the wholesale abandonment of service provision to people in need, organisations will step in. The organisations who have stepped in to provide services were the state has failed, require funding, and it is very difficult for the people running them to refuse money where it is going spare. That’s not to say that NGOs and service providers should accept donations from any old capitalist multinational regardless of where it comes from or how it’s raised, merely to acknowledge that principles are all very well and good when you can afford to have them.

And while I’m deeply suspicious of people who campaign for the rescue of dogs in the streets before, say, looking for housing for homeless humans in the streets, there is a more important discussion to be had here, and that concerns the absolute myth of corporate social responsibility, and the belief in the idea that charity will solve the social ills of the world when in many cases the reality is that its continued existence doesn’t do anything but further exacerbate those ills. I hold my hands up and say I don’t have the answers to any of this (apart from smash capitalism and patriarchy obviously). Charitable endeavours much of the time are a sticking plaster for the injurious nature of capitalism. Yes, they hold people together, but dependence on state funding very often results in gagging them from articulating just how bad things really are.

Tesco may like to seem nice and cuddly because they are big outfit and they donate money to a women’s refuge, but we as a community need to acknowledge that the women’s refuge needs money because the state will not provide it in the first place. Putting aside for the moment another long but necessary discussion bemoaning the fact that we wouldn’t need women’s refuges if men would keep their fists to themselves, the state will not provide the funding needed, partially because corporations will not pay large sums in corporation tax which could be funnelled in to service provision. Many women are forced for to remain in situations of domestic violence simply because they cannot afford to leave. Poor women find it more difficult to escape domestic violence and I would be willing to put money on the fact that there have been people employed by Tesco sheltered in women’s refuges before – they only pay €9 per hour to their customer assistants, just above the legal minimum wage in the state. Perhaps if women were paid a little bit better, they would have more options other than underfunded domestic violence shelters when leaving abusive relationships.

Which children’s charity will criticise Tesco for making it cheaper to feed children rubbish high-sugar food when it could potentially one day be Tesco’s charity of the year? NGOs are regularly prevented from being overly critical of governments when they depend on state agencies and statutory bodies for funding to do their work. When state funding is becoming thinner and thinner on the ground, corporate social responsibility philanthropic programmes will inevitably make it more difficult for organisations to criticise the actions of businesses that make their existence necessary in the first place.

The Tesco website has a statement on corporate responsibility:

“As Ireland’s leading retailer, our stores serve a large number of communities throughout the country. Our interaction with these communities reminds us daily about our responsibilities as an employer, as a business and as a good neighbour…”

Of course, we know this is nonsense. Capitalist companies having corporate social responsibility because they care about the communities in which they are located, is a myth. As this Forbes piece shows, corporate social responsibility in the form of charitable donations is useful for businesses because it means more profits. Business energy efficiency = lower energy costs = increased profits. The caring business is a complete fallacy.

The Forbes article also describes how New Perimeter are a nonprofit law firm established by DLA Piper providing pro bono legal assistance in developing and post-conflict regions. What Forbes left out, is that DLA piper entered a partnership with Brazilian law firm Campos Mellos Advogados in 2010, who handled and encouraged Brazilian real estate deals for the building of infrastructure for the World Cup 2014. The same World Cup where the building of infrastructure necessary for it to take place left 250,000 people homeless. DLA Piper and Campos Mellos Advogados have also sent lawyers to Israel to encourage and promote commercial ties with Israel. So DLA Piper staff donate their time to New Perimeter and get to feel warm and fuzzy on the inside while their paid employment is to perpetuate other people’s misery. Caring corporate social responsibility does not exist.

After protests during the past few weeks across Ireland calling for an end to the Israeli offensive in the Gaza strip, Tesco announced that it would no longer stock fruit that came from illegal Israeli settlements. However Tesco has failed to clarify how it is going to differentiate between food from illegal Israeli settlements, and food from outside of them, or whether their boycott will extend to food packaged in illegal settlements but not necessarily grown there. It is a far cry from the BDS campaign that calls for a boycott of all Israeli products until Israel upholds international law. Tesco has form when it comes to being sketchy as to where supplies come from, but it got the nice headlines about Israeli fruit and got to talk about their responsibilities as an employer and neighbour at a time when they knew it was politically popular to do so, while still actually stocking Israeli produce.

So Tesco in Cabra might donate €300 to a women’s refuge in a few weeks, but will probably continue to stock Israeli produce and profit from the violation of rights of people in Palestine, and the actual murder of Palestinian women in Gaza.

Businesses engage in PR exercises that present a facade of social responsibility when their actual business practices are wildly different to what they portray, but it makes liberals feel good about their engagement with capitalism. Buy more stuff. Put another blue token in the box. Save a puppy, and so on. When the motive of an action is profit, there can be no such thing as corporate responsibility, it merely serves to legitimise neo-liberal economics and exploitation, and a few bob to the local women’s refuge won’t change the fact that it capitalism contributes to the need for funding for refuges in the first place.

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The Moral Outrage of the Damned: Public reaction to the plight of Sabrina McMahon

Posted on April 25, 2014 by Stephanie Lord

Sabrina McMahon is 36 years old. She has three children, ages 5, 3, and 1. She and her three children currently live in her car. Sabrina has lived in her car for the past week after her “temporary” arrangements, which lasted a year, broke down. She formerly worked as a dental nurse and as a carer. She keeps her buggy, nappies and possessions in the boot of her car and her groceries in the front. She avails of the kindness of friends so she can wash and clean her clothes. Her children sleep in the back. When the baby wakes for a bottle she switches on the engine to keep her warm. A Sinn Féin Councillor Maire Devine, has been making representations to South Dublin County Council on her behalf for the past year while she went from relative to relative over the months since her relationship broke down. When SDCC were contacted by the Irish Times for comment, they said they were “aware” of the case but didn’t wish to say anything further which was unsurprising.

Unless they were going to say, “We are deeply ashamed that we have failed to show basic human decency to this woman and her family and find her a home” they were probably better off to say nothing. No landlord will accept rent allowance from her. She presented at the Dublin Central Placement Service and was told to go back to Kildare, where she had previously lived, but she wants to live near her family.

If was I was living in a car with three small children I would want to live near my family too.

Her story was on the front page of the Irish Times and it covered on all the major radio stations. On Newstalk this morning, texts flooded in saying that Sabrina was a bad mother; that she should have her children taken from her; that she shouldn’t have even had her children in the first place; that she was irresponsible and only “using” the media to get a free ride on the back of taxpayers. Social media users had a field day in condemning the parenting skills of a woman who is literally living on the margins of society. Very little was said about her former partner. However, the level of misogyny and hatred directed at her in those texts and comments was a slightly more ignorant representation of the structural misogyny directed at her from the state. The state shows its disdain for women like Sabrina by failing to provide for her needs. The tweets condemning her are this simply this same attitude refined to 140 characters.

There are 98,000 families waiting for social housing in this state and the comments levelled at Sabrina McMahon are not unusual. In fact, Sabrina’s situation is not unusual. People are fooling themselves if they think that Sabrina McMahon is the only person in Ireland living in her car right now. And the comments about her are the same type of comments made about poor and homeless women who become pregnant and have families because they generally pathologised as people who made bad decisions, lack male authority, and exist without morals or values. They are believed to be selfish and parasitic and rearing children in their own rough image. It is the stock depiction of the very poorest working class women.

While Sabrina has some bread rolls in the front seat of her car, her problem is that she isn’t a consumer. She just wants somewhere to live that’s safe. It’s one of the most basic things a person can ask for. She isn’t economically productive, and therefore doesn’t warrant the concern of the state. She is a mother and a carer so not considered to be engaging in “real work.”

Women do the lion‘s share of unpaid household and care work. But it isn’t considered “work” because there are no wages, it’s just what women do. It is a bizarre attitude from a state that has a Constitution that specifically assigns a woman’s role to the home. But the very structure of capitalism, depends on women doing the majority of this form of work without payment. Neoliberal capitalism neglects to acknowledge that women working within the home (or from their car in the absence of having a home) are economically productive as it allows the State to not provide public childcare infrastructure or other supports for childrearing. It is just something that women are expected to do, but it isn’t good enough for the terms of capitalist patriarchy.

Unfortunately Sabrina lives in a place where the government department responsible for welfare, the Department of Social Protection, aim to restructure the lives of poor women like Sabrina, in both a physical and a moral sense. It was not by mistake that it was the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs Frances Fitzgerald was out commenting on this story today, to address the concerned masses’ cries of “won’t somebody please think of the children?” rather than the Minister for Social Protection or the Minister for Environment, who ultimately have the responsibility for Sabrina’s situation.

It is unlikely that those who had the luxury of sending a message from their smartphone to a radio station to condemn and blame Sabrina for her situation, stopped to contemplate the precarity of their own situations; how many of them are only two, three or four pay packets away from homelessness themselves.

Not only was Sabrina demonised as a bad parent – but through their commentary, the very value of her existence was questioned. Caring for three small children in the back of a car isn’t valued because it is unpaid labour, although it is probably fair to say that if those who condemned Sabrina were forced to do it, they would think it was pretty hard work indeed.

SPARK ran a campaign last year against a programme forcing lone mams to work when their children turned 7, which had been introduced by Minister Joan Burton. You couldn’t have people remaining economically unproductive now could you? The rationale is that the state cannot allow people to exist in a way that does not overtly benefit capitalism. The point of that programme was to redeem the women who do not have male authority in their lives by forcing them into a situation where they would live within a patriarchal system that would give them male authority in the form of employment. The likelihood is, if they even managed to get a job, their boss would be a man. It is the state’s antidote to these dreadful welfare recipients of getting something for nothing. This particular form of workfare is branded an “activation measure” but it is punitive. It punishes women for not conforming to a life that involves a man who is a breadwinner.

Women don’t become poor in a vacuum. Women like Sabrina don’t live in cars for the fun of it and as austerity continues to destroy Irish society, we will continue to see more Sabrinas living in more cars and cardboard boxes, and sadly, more people willing to condemn them for it.

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Posted in capitalism, Politics, Reproduction, The family and tagged austerity, care work, feminism, housing, Ireland. Bookmark the permalink.

Your girlie bits offend some people.

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Stephanie Lord

A PR disaster for feminine hygiene company Femfresh developed on the internet this week after their refusal to use the word “vagina” on their facebook page. Femfresh make feminine hygiene wipes – that is, wipes for vaginas, among a range of other products from gels to washes that serve the same purpose. One would expect that a company in the business of selling vagina-related products wouldn’t have any problem with saying the word vagina.

It was not to be. Instead of saying the v-word they took to using a number of words instead of it such as “va jay jay, kitty, nooni, lala, froo froo!” to describe women’s vaginas. It would be interesting to see transcipts of the discussions of their marketing meetings where that decision was made.

If you cared about your Lala at all you dirty girl, you’d buy our stuff.

Their Facebook page, which has now been deleted as a result of the uproar, was aghast with comments from rightfully disgruntled women who took umbrage with the fact that the Femfresh felt the need to give their vagina a new, rather infantilised, and for many insulting, name. The Facebook page showed an image of a woman at a festival under which someone added the most wonderful comment;

“I can’t go to any festivals! I’ll be too busy sitting at home crying about the embarrassing smell of my shame-shame.”

It generated a very interesting discussion on various blogs about why women took offence to the Femfresh idea that there was something offensive about the word ‘vagina’ and why it really didn’t need another name because the word ‘vagina’ was sufficient in itself.

The thing is though; nobody should be really surprised that Femfresh would consider that the word ‘vagina’ is too offensive to use on their facebook page and that a more sanitised word should be employed instead. Their whole business is based on the premise that vaginas are inherently offensive and in need of sanitising -coincidentally, women have the opportunity to make their genitals less offensive if they buy Femfresh products to wash themselves with. It wouldn’t do to let women believe that their genitals are pretty much fine in their natural state.

This is about sending women a message that female bodies, where they are not aided by products that alter their natural state, be it their skin colour, hair levels, or ph balance for that matter, are unfeminine and unnatural and it is imperative that women engage in the alteration and self-regulation of their own bodies. To just wash normally, according to Femfresh, would not be hygienic enough, despite being contrary to all known medical evidence, so one must buy their product and do something extra. Where is Foucault when you need him?

There are rules within patriarchal capitalism and women who do not conform to the self-regulation of the body must be painted as being abnormal lest it threaten the sales of body-altering products. Although she wrote on the issue of weight, it’s rather similar to philosopher Elizabeth Grosz’s idea that women’s bodies in their natural state in Western societies are construed as being uncontained, uncontrolled and dangerous to a Western Patriarchal order. The woman’s body is positioned as being in need of control when in its natural state – almost as if it possesses a formlessness and disorder that threatens the order of patriarchy if left untamed. A body in no need of “untaming” would have no need for the purchase of commodities to tame it, and where would that leave capitalism?

Medical discourse decides what is healthy, and Femfresh (as well as other companies selling similar products) have attempted to appropriate the ability to control the “ph balance” of a vagina despite the fact that the vagina is self-regulating when it comes to its ph balance. But products sell much faster when you convince people that it’s for the good of their health.

There are many similarities to the marketing of these products and menstruation products. Simone De Beauvoir wrote about the idea of shame attached to the female body as far back as 1949;

“It is not easy to play the idol, the fairy, the faraway princess when one feels a bloody cloth between one’s legs”.

And even today despite its normality (for the majority of cis-women at least) menstruation or even the natural and normal activity of what goes on between a woman’s legs is deemed to be a tainted aspect of femininity that she must keep hidden and secret at all times – because any other party’s knowledge of it would damage her femininity.

Advertisements for Femfresh style hygiene products as well as menstrual products depict the unattended woman’s genitals as a threat to the traditional image of femininity. Even the packaging for the products is specifically designed so as to be “discrete” and the secrecy of compliance with menstrual etiquette serves to reinforce to women their status as objects, and not as humans. This type of grooming is portrayed by these companies as a method for women to self-improve on the way to self-fulfilment; liberation will be found in the idealised body type – you must look a certain way, and you must smell a certain way. As they frame it, to not engage in this practice is to let yourself go and for a woman – according to the terms of patriarchal capitalism – to let yourself or your body go is to reject womanhood itself.

Thus self-improvement can be achieved, but it must be purchased by using more products and spending more money. For Femfresh the process is not an optional extra – it is about being healthy and maintaining a ph balance after all – it is about paying to bring the body to a state of normality as they have defined it and rescinding the body’s own control of itself.

Confidence problems? Femfresh will sort that. All you need to do it wipe your ladybits and make sure it smells like a meadow down there. Or else, no confidence for you!

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